• 2 Posts
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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 5th, 2023

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  • I’ve been using this on and off for a while, since v1.3 in September (and swapping with InnerTune which seems to now be abandoned…) but I have a few glaring issues with it as a daily driver.

    Downloads are a mess. Tap download and it may or may not download. The download notification frequently becomes persistent for some reason, even if the downloads have finished and you kill/restart the app. Restarting my phone will get rid of it. Accessing auto cached songs is hit and miss if you don’t have internet which completely defeats the point of it. Also there’s no download management so whatever you download is now what you have saved unless you delete the library and start over…

    The library page is ass. There’s no breakdowns by song or artist or album or any other category. You have favorites, followed, most played, and downloaded along with a bunch of playlists under that and finally a recently added list. If I want to shuffle my library I go to downloaded (because I download everything) and just tap a song which will start playing but take the UI ~10 seconds to catch up while, I’m assuming, it builds the playlist.

    When I connect to a bluetooth device and my screen turns off I immediately lose the bluetooth connection. Turn the screen back on, reconnect, start playing the music again and it works fine after that. This only happens with SimpMusic. Occasionally have had issues connecting to bluetooth and the app says it’s playing via bluetooth but when you change the volume it says it’s playing via phone while no audio is coming out anywhere. This is usually paired with a “something unexpected happened” error message and app restart (have had this issue loop before for hours, phone restart fixed it).

    The music player notification stops working regularly and just won’t come back until I restart the phone.

    Intense lag after listening for a while.

    No dislike button to help avoid songs.

    And maybe my last complaint which is relatively minor to the other things, but under some categories, like new releases, it will show the art, the name of the album/single and then say “Album” instead of the artist which probably annoys me more than it should and may be a result of the other issues adding up.

    No, my last complaint is the copying of Spotify’s horrible UI, but somehow it’s even worse.

    On the upside, sponsorblock works well, my YTM playlists are all accessible, even ones I forgot existed from the GPM days, and the app does work for the most part. Long listening sessions work better than Innertune or Vimusic did. Hoping to see this continue to be worked on and improved, it still has a long way to go though.








  • I can’t comment on questions 1, 3, and 5 but I have been using Real-Debrid for around four years now (through Kodi mostly because I don’t want to have to manage a huge server again, occasionally I download directly to watch later/on a different device/non-video stuff) and I’ve been pretty happy with them so I’ll answer from that perspective.

    Quality is great. As you mentioned in Q4, it works via torrents so if a torrent exists you’re free to grab whatever you want. You can stream or download from RD once it’s been cached by them. Even 50+GB Bluray remux streams fine directly from them. As for file naming, in the thousands of downloads I’ve gone through, I think I’ve come across two incidents where something wasn’t named properly and I ended up with something I didn’t expect but I believe both of those were Kodi issues, not RD. One was a movie where I got a foreign movie of a similar name and one was a TV series where it kept trying to play the wrong season/episode. In both cases I was able to just manually add the torrent/magnet and RD had it fully downloaded basically instantly or I was able to manually select another file in Kodi. The file names are what you expect with a torrent though with the title/year and all the quality and codec info in the filename so it’s hard to get the wrong thing. I don’t think I’ve ever come across deliberately misnamed files. It would get nuked pretty fast, trackers usually take stuff like that pretty seriously.

    Assuming something is relatively available RD seems to be able to grab it very quickly. Like as fast as the page refreshes after adding the torrent/magnet. You also download very quickly from them; I typically see over 100MBs down over my wireless connection in a house with several other people using our connection which is pretty much fully saturating our bandwidth lol. Occasionally I have had issues getting something, but like with most things, the older and more obscure you get the harder it is to find sources for. In that case you may want to be on certain trackers. This is kind of why I like Kodi because there are plugins that focus on different types of media and some may have better luck finding, say, old 90s cartoons while others are better for anime. Once it gets added to my debrid I can go back and grab it/rewatch later. But for more popular stuff, I typically just use one of the big name public trackers. RD grabs it and I get it securely and privately from them. I’ve never bothered with a VPN and have never had issues.

    One thing that I didn’t see mentioned was downtime. Occasionally RD has had some downtime. If you’ve ever been on the addons4kodi subreddit you’ve probably seen the posts with people freaking out about it within minutes of it going down. Downtime is typically minimal and usually back up within minutes to a few hours. In a few instances (like maybe twice?) it went down for like 12 hours or longer? Not really sure, if it goes down I just find something else to do and check later in the day or the next day and it’s back up. RD has also been known to compensate days worth of service for hours of downtime which is pretty nice. I haven’t heard the same about Alldebrid or Premiumize.

    RD also gives you tokens based on the service package you buy (called fidelity points). 1000 points will convert to 30 days of service. I buy 180 days at a time which is currently around $17.33 USD and I get 800 points, so buying a year (~$35) gets me an extra month with points left over. Then the next several 180 day purchases also get extra months with them.











  • I had more awe inspiring and mind blowing moments in ~100 hours of SC than in my 2000+ hours of ED. The role playing and shenanigans with other players, the diverse locations, the scale of everything… It’s just so much more interesting and immersive compared to ED and continuing to get better. ED is what I expect to actually be out in our galaxy, a whole lot of nothing. 400 billion star systems with the depth of a puddle.